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The Last Message Sent on AIM

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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#61

Post by Nextgrid »

culopatin wrote: post #59
tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature. All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.

Don't worry, they ruined Skype too.

It used to be great and the P2P nature of it meant that file transfer speed, call quality & reliability was down to your network connection, something that you can control and fix should it be bad.

The clients also used to be beautiful, both on Windows and Mac. They replaced both with an Electron abomination.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#62

Post by everdrive »

tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

If AOL or MSN had figured out how to monetize these platforms, they would have ruined them anyhow. They would have been lost in a different way.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#63

Post by adrianN »

meerita wrote: post #45
tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

Truth is, there were chances to renew, rebuild, ressurrect old messaging ecosystems, like ICQ but they sucked so bad it's really hard to take chance.

It was a golden age of instant messaging. You could talk to anybody on any network because multiprotocol clients just worked. I basically gave up on instant messaging because every company now digs deeper and deeper moats around their network.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#65

Post by sillysaurusx »

xenihn wrote: post #50
Jenk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too. I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic…

AIM was profitable until the day that it was shut down.

How?

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#66

Post by icedchai »

k__ wrote: post #64

Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.

AIM was big in the late 90’s to early 2000’s. I still had 2 people I talked to on it through 2015 or so.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#67

Post by mrfusion »

tinco wrote: post #20

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…

What’s the story behind that? You’re right, that’s astounding.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#68

Post by causality0 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #61
culopatin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature. All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.

Don't worry, they ruined Skype too. It used to be great and the P2P nature of it meant that file transfer speed, call quality & reliability was down to your network connection, something that you can control and fix should it be bad. The clients also used to be beautiful, both on Windows and Mac. They replaced both with an Electron abomination.

Don't forget that if you accidentally merged your Microsoft account with your old Skype account you could lose all the contacts. I lost several gaming buddies that way when I didn't have alternate contact info.

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#69

Post by george3d6 »

josephg wrote: post #56
ThePhysicist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the…

> We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners. Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks a…

You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs".

What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).

Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM

#70

Post by [deleted] »

dmingod666 wrote: post #53
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, they were shut down because they were designed in a way that they were centrally controlled by one entity which had the ability to shut them down, just like that.

Discord, google chat, WhatsApp slack, Telegram, MsTeams, almost all commonly used chat clients are centrally managed..

[deleted]
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